US President Joe Biden said Wednesday he still believes Chinese President Xi Jinping is a dictator, even as the two leaders made progress in their relationship during a meeting outside San Francisco.
“Well, look, he’s a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that’s based on a form of government totally different than ours,” Biden told CNN’s MJ Lee. “Anyway, we made progress.”
When asked about Biden’s latest comment at a Chinese Foreign Ministry briefing on Thursday, a spokesperson called it “extremely erroneous” and an “irresponsible political maneuver, which China firmly opposes.”
China is effectively a dictatorship. It has one political party and Xi Jinping ended the two term limit so he could stay in power. What form of government would you say they have?
It has nine political parties, not one. But also, political parties work differently in a socialist country. You can’t expect other systems to be a 1-to-1 mapping of what you have in your country.
Even in a socialist country with a single party (which is not the case of China), there is competition for leadership.
The leader of China is elected. Really elected, without rigged elections like you see in countries like Russia. That effectively makes it not a dictatorship.
All this talk of China being a dictatorship comes from US propaganda.
So let me try and break a few of the misconceptions created by the US propaganda machine: the leader is elected. People can complain about the government, and they do. Not only that, but the government is regularly reading criticism and using that to make things better. There is no social credit score.
Edit: Actually, the US propaganda is weird. China has been getting flak for its social credit system for years, but they don’t have a social credit system. On the other hand, Italy DOES HAVE a social credit system, but since it’s a western country nobody talks about it.
There may be other political parties but none of them have anywhere near the power of the CPC. They are all subordinate. For example, all election candidates must be approved by the CPC.
Also, the only direct elections in China are at the local level. At higher levels of government everything is chosen by local congresses. This results in a system where the people at the top are very removed from the votes of citizens.
Also, the national Congress largely exists to rubber-stamp whatever Xi Jinping wants. Any opposition would be swiftly stamped out.